Healing the Wound of Separation
How do you think eating disorders try to support, remedy, bring into balance, defend against, protect from, symbolize, or embody the energy of the world that we currently are living in today?
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Disordered eating can often get unnoticed because we live in a world where the ways that we relate to food and our bodies are somewhat disordered.
Things like dieting, over-exercising, or leaving out whole food groups are promoted and not questioned. A particular body type - that cannot be achieved or sustained - is idealized and accepted in our culture.
We can call this culture that we live in “diet culture”, whereby a certain body type is idolized, some foods are demonized whilst others are idealized, and places the pursuit of thinness as a moral virtue. On a baseline level, we are swimming in big collective soup where restriction and the obsessive pursuit of thinness as considered ok.
And it’s not ok.
Underneath all of the restriction, dieting, leaving out certain foods, clean eating, bingeing, over-exercising, purging, and over-eating beyond fullness are deep cries and yearnings for connection.
Eating disorders symbolise the imperative need of finding our way back to whole connection.
When we see beyond the food, we see what it takes for us to truly recover and disentangle from the rigid and sticky food and body rules.
To recover and transform is to heal the wound of separation - the separation from our own bodies, from our communities, from the Earth, from our hearts, and from our authentic embodiment.
When we notice how the food is a symbol for where there has been a severance, we can start laying down the pathways back to connection.
Embedded in genuine and supportive connection are safety, belonging, and integrity. We have the right and the innate capacity to feel safety in our own bodies and within the world. We have the right and the innate capacity to feel a sense of true belonging on this Earth, home in our own bodies, and a belonging with a resonant tribe of people. We have the right and the innate capacity to feel a sense of enoughness, wholeness, and integrity simply because we are alive.
And with the right supportive, containing conditions with others, we have the capacity to transmute limiting eating disorder imprints into empowered blueprints, whereby we can live from a whole, heart-centered, and connected embodiment. This is recovery. And we cannot do it alone.
When we step into a more authentic embodiment, we are essentially widening our toolbox to deal with the inevitable ebbs and flows of life.
An eating disorder, in whatever shape it looks, is a tool that tries to help someone move through a challenge. The concern is that when it is the only tool to move through that challenge, then food and the body are compromised, and someone can put their health and their vitality in danger.
Thus, recovery is actually widening that toolbox, so that we don't have to keep gripping onto food, or onto the body to try feel a sense of safety, belonging, or integrity.
These additional tools, when practiced regularly, reeducate the nervous system how to establish grounding, safety, and holding; support feelings of wholeness and integrity despite what has happened; and encourage healthy boundaries and the seeking of welcoming belonging.
When these tools are added to the toolbox, and the stresses and unknowns of life come, there is greater tolerance to be with the discomfort and increased capacity to move through the groundlessness of change and challenge with an inner holding and inner grounding.
Rather than escaping and moving away from the discomfort, there is an ability to actually be with it - connected to it - and to move through it to the other side. If the challenge is actually too overwhelming however, and all that feels accessible is to go into ED patterns of numbing or pushing away, we can choose to go into it consciously into them, but with an expanded awareness of what is happening and how the nervous system is perceiving the experience.
In this way, we are consciously adding, practicing, and implementing tools to the toolbox that are conscious, sustainable, and supportive in the long-run.
On the other hand, an eating disorder is unconsciously picked up as a tool during a time of challenge when there were no other effective tools at hand. The behaviour (whether it be restriction, binging, purging etc.) is understood by the psyche as an efficient way to push through discomfort.
This eating behaviour forms a very deep imprint/pattern within the psyche. And this pattern is in the driver's seat, ruling the show, driving actions, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. This imprint can become pervasive, infiltrating the whole root system within the psyche, touching on almost every part of an individual's life.
By focusing on the food or on the body, we don’t have to look within. Like any addiction, the focus is placed on the external to help solve or alleviate the problem - in the short-term.
As such, recovery - as painful as it can be - is learning to go underneath and dig up what isn’t being faced, with the sturdy support of a wider toolbox.
By connecting within, we start the process of learning how to trust ourselves, and this is how the imprints that keep us focused on the external start to shift, affecting the way we think, feel and act - that is, from the inside out.
Through diet culture’s promises of saving us and making us better people through diet and fitness programs and detox cleanses, we learn that we cannot trust ourselves or the voice within.
They lead us to believe that we have to place our power, hopes, dreams, and aspirations in the hands of the products they hope to sell us and pocket from.
So when we choose recovery, it is about listening within - to trust the inner voice, and to move from that place, guided by intuitive impulses and somatic knowledge.
Recovery is about coming back home, bringing this fragmented and external orientation back into wholeness.
This is what trauma healing is about: bringing the truncated parts back into the whole. And this is how psychedelics, microdosing, and sacred plant medicine can support eating disorder recovery - they inherently supporting the healing, remembering, reclaiming, and restoration of the true, core self.
Indeed, at its core, an eating disorder symbolises the disconnection from the essential, whole self.
It is a symbol of separation from the actual body. It is a separation from food that brings nourishment and life force. It is a separation from being close and in connection with the world. It is a separation from pleasure and play. It is a separation from the body of this Earth (how we treat and relate to our bodies is a reflection our relationship with the Earth).
And it seems that eating disorders are more prevalent than ever. This is because we are in such a deep time of separation where there has been a huge severing across our entire world. This time has reflected back to us and impacted how we feel safe within our own bodies, and with others, as well as our sense of belonging. The current state of the world is asking us what it takes to move from the generational and collective imprints of separation into embodying blueprints of wholeness.
Think about times in the past where you have felt a shift from separation to connection.
What were those nourishing conditions that positively supported you to come home within yourself? Who or what provided a safe container for you to express your authentic embodiment and your voice? What was needed for you to feel a sense of inherent belonging, integrity, and safety to simply be?
I invite you now to imagine a world that is whole, connected and free from eating disorders.
Bring to mind ways of how people relate to each other, how people value their bodies, how people eat, and what foods they nourish themselves with. You can notice how people relate to younger or older generations, people of colour, transpeople, people from different social classes, people with different physical or mental abilities, and people in any and all body sizes. What do you see? What systems and institutions would change, shift, or completely fall away? How would we be educating our children? What would the schools, health systems, media outlets, or governments communicate? What is the energetic frequency of this vision that you see?
And finally, think about what it would take for the eating disorder to let go of us?
Who do we have to become for it to let go of us? What do have to embody so that the eating disorder can no longer hold on.
This is a vision of freedom. This is a vision of connection and wholeness. And this vision is possible - and it starts within.
Recovery starts with connecting with and acknowledging the body (which can often the hardest part), and can be done through developing regulation tools for the nervous system and for emotions.
It starts with encouraging dance, movement and creative expression, play, pleasure, joy, spontaneity, and flexibility.
It starts with turning within and listening to the inner guidance, allowing and following intuitive impulses rather than restricting them.
It starts with supporting healthy boundaries, agency, choice, and authentic expression rather than silencing.
It starts with acknowledging the wound of separation within ourselves, within our family and within our culture. It starts with recognizing the diet culture mentality, to stand up against it, and to no longer perpetuate it.
It starts with connecting to this great body of the Earth as a way to care for our bodies in nurturing and compassionate ways, that also support the expansion of our perpetual lens, and feeling more interconnected and at home in the world.
It starts with establishing a baseline of deservingness and worthiness that stands in the belief that we deserve to heal. We deserve to transform, to be in our fullest authentic expression and embodiment in ways that feel safe and that are celebrated.
Recovery and transformation start with love - to give and to receive love, and ultimately to hold love within. This process brings the fragmented parts back into wholeness and into connection, held in safety and integrity.
Recovery is whole-ing embodiment process whereby we come home to our bodies, and are able to fully embrace the world around us.
Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash